Fear and Technology in the Theatre: Staging McLuhan

Abstract

Although Marshall McLuhan had comparatively little to say about the theatre as a medium in his books, Robin C. Whittaker’s observation that “performance was integral to the delivery of McLuhan’s messages” serves as a reminder to address the question considering an added dimension.1 For example, at the “Theatre and the Visual Arts” panel at the Fourth Annual Seminar in Irish Studies held in 1971 at the University of Toronto, McLuhan was very much the performer in expressing various thoughts about the “electric theatre,” to the delight of both his co-panelists and audience present.2 Conversing with W. H. Auden and renowned Beckett actor Jack MacGowran, McLuhan asks “what the Greeks might have done with PA systems if they’d had them... would they have shunned the gramophone and radio?”3 Auden and MacGowran are categorical in their responses, MacGowran’s retort that “they (the Greeks) would have been deadly against” being blunt and to the point.4 McLuhan answers by musing “whether this (incursion of electronic media) will change acting and the problems of the visual organization of theatre is another question.”5 In recent years the stage itself has entered the dialog, revisiting McLuhan and his theories. Examples include Michael Charrois’ The Illumination o f Marshall McLuhan: An Interactive Multi Media Performance Event (2000), Jason Sherman’s play The Message (2003 2018), Anne Bogart’s Theater Artaud’s production of The Medium (1995), and Mark Lawes’ 2013 staging of Sometimes Between Now and When the Sun Goes Supernova at Theatre Junction Grand. Although diverse in approach and scope, all of the above theatrical treatments of McLuhan echo an increasing interest of the theatre in addressing the relationship of the live with technology in a “mediatized culture.”6 In Auslander’s view the two are not necessarily in opposition to each other, nor does the live necessarily precede the mediatized, instead being mutually interdependent.